Article

Stolen from the New York Times. Primarily because of this line: “We had an accident one time. We read ‘Water for Elephants.’ It was a huge mistake.” Secondarily because it’s an interesting read:

Men Have Book Clubs, Too

By Jennifer Miller, New York Times

None of the men in the Man Book Club had a problem with the bull-castration scene in “The Power of the Dog,” a 1967 novel by Thomas Savage. But more than one member of this all-male reading group in Marin County, Calif., got squeamish when the host announced that the taco appetizers he had prepared that night were filled with ground-up Rocky Mountain oysters — that is, animal testicles.

“The fun part was looking at the expressions,” said the club’s founder, Andrew McCullough, 53. “Some guys had real difficulty swallowing. I kept eating. I have standards I need to adhere to, as secretary and founder.”

The Man Book Club is going into its ninth year. It has 16 members, a number of whom are lawyers and engineers in their mid-50s. Each month, the host must prepare a meal appropriate to the book under discussion.

There was an eight-course French supper to accompany Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” and a meal of refined comfort food presented on TV trays for Bill Bryson’s 1950s-era memoir, “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.”

“I was always a little jealous of my wife’s book clubs,” Mr. McCullough said. “Now our wives are jealous of us. We’ve created something that is more durable. The book club my wife belongs to — there’s a lot of changeover.”

Women, it seems, can afford to drop in and out of reading groups. In its 2011 survey of voluntary organizations, the Pew Research Center found that 11 percent of Americans were active in “literary, discussion or study groups such as book clubs” and that women were more than twice as likely to take part in such gatherings as men were.

Perhaps because participation in reading groups is perceived as a female activity, some all-male book clubs have an outsize need to proclaim the endeavor’s masculinity. In addition to going by the name the Man Book Club, for instance, Mr. McCullough’s group expresses its notion of manliness through the works it chooses to read. “We do not read so-called chick lit,” he said. “The main character cannot be a woman.”